Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
~~Silicon Valley~~New York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Cars without compromise.

Book Plugs:

Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
BSD Mall

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12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Monday, April 25, 2011
11:21 - Steal from the best	(top)
I wasn't too impressed initially with the description of OS X Lion (10.7), which in its previews seemed like Apple had unexpectedly fallen prey to one of the oldest and most pernicious foibles in software, which is to latch on to whatever product or concept has turned out to be a surprise hit and set about incorporating its features into everything else you make. Microsoft did this back in the late 90s by grabbing on to "that Internet thing" and sewing it into Windows, despite how poorly it integrated and what a mess it made of the user experience (and what a legal can of worms it opened up). Companies that put Twitter and Facebook icons all over their websites are a similar case in point: just because it's trendy and a zero-effort marketing exercise, everyone from restaurants to upcoming movies wants you to "follow them on Facebook", as though anyone wants to be the "friend" of the bagel shop down the street or find out what the new Ford Fiesta is twittering about. (I've come to view it as a badge of honor for a site not to have social-media icons: it shows that the company has enough confidence in its own product not to have to jump on an irritating bandwagon of dubious merit just to score some wandering eyeballs.) So it didn't thrill me to see that Apple was out-and-out telling everybody that the iPad was such a successful "post-PC" device that now they'll be migrating its concepts to their PCs as well. Now, wasn't one of Apple's greatest coups the fact that they knew (and, indeed, had learned through difficult mistakes) when it was appropriate—and when it wasn't—to use a dedicated, purpose-built UI? People scoffed at the idea of the iPhone back in 2006-07 because they assumed Apple would just be porting Mac OS X to a 3.5-inch screen, making people use a stylus to emulate a mouse and pull down little menus and tap on bouncing Dock icons with genie effects. Surprisingly few people expected them to create what amounts to a completely new operating system with a completely new interface paradigm, one designed around modal application views (it didn't even support multitasking at first, and only nerds really cared enough about it to get them to change their minds) and a Newtonian complete lack of a user-exposed filesystem. Perhaps they were right to make that assumption, seeing that Windows Mobile devices had operated on the "make it as much like Windows as possible on a small screen" principle for so many years; but these also tended to be people unfamiliar with Apple's guiding rule that if they can't make something great, they would be better off not to bother. Better to stay out of a market segment altogether than to cheapen the brand with a crappy product that doesn't absolutely blow away everybody's expectations. So what to make of the fact that OS X Lion looked like—and indeed was advertised as—the adaptation of the iPad's interface metaphors to the Mac desktop? I figured we all realized that what works on the iPad would not necessarily work on the Mac, since after all every computer-savvy person who carries around a MacBook Pro and an iPad is quick to point out how each device is suited for its own specific use cases, each one doings things the other isn't good at, and not attempting the things it can't do very well on its own. You do media consumption and casual browsing/email and gaming and dedicated app stuff on the iPad; and you use your Mac for content creation, writing, video editing, developing... ...And here's where my brain started to get stuck the other day when I was helping a friend set up his new 27" iMac. Someone who's in love with his iPhone and iPads, yet who has been stuck in Windows this whole time. And let's be frank: it was a spectacle. The all-but-cordless iMac turned his cluttered desk into a showpiece. The startup sequence was dazzling. And (to my surprise, since I hadn't seen a brand-new freshly installed Mac in a while) all the default settings and behaviors are honed to the point where it all feels so natural I didn't even want to tinker with anything to match any of my vestigial personal preferences dating back to 1998. But still, as I was explaining UI concepts and keyboard shortcuts and System Preferences one by one, it crept up on me that despite all we've all been through with the Mac over the past three decades... it's still not anything a normal person can get his brain around. It's still a computer, not a friendly piece of "magical" technology like an iPad. And so the process of migrating over and getting everything set up—iTunes files, email accounts, Office documents, all the icons splattered all over the desktop—was far from the thing of beauty it could have been... and, indeed, should have been. After all, I was still having to explain it. I found myself saying things like "Okay, so here's where your applications are. See, you click this icon in the Dock, and they all pop out; and if you want easy access to one, you just drag it down here into the Dock, anywhere you want. And if you want to get rid of it, you just drag it off and it goes poof. ...No, it doesn't mean it's deleted. It just means it's not in... well, it's not in the Dock, but it's still in the popup window you get when you click on the Dock icon. That's actually a view of the Applications folder, see, and that's on the disk, but in this view it's just a representation, and the Dock icon is a representation of what's in that, and... oh God dammit. Here: just open up a Finder window like this in Column view and navigate into Applications and do it that way." This is where I realized that even despite all the strides Apple has made in the last ten years in making their computers accessible, and no matter how straightforward it is compared to the equivalent procedures on Windows ("Is it in the main Start menu? I guess not, I haven't used it recently enough; let's look in All Programs. Okay, that's not showing all of them either; maybe it's in one of these folders... you know what, never mind, there's a systray icon for it, but you have to widen the view to see it..."), compared to the iPad it's still black magic. The App Store is the first step in making Macs into something as seamless as the iPad, for the vast numbers of people who bought and love iPads but wouldn't otherwise have given a Mac a second glance. And Lion is what will make sure it doesn't disappoint once they've bought one and brought it home. Mail on OS X should be as seamless and smooth as it is on an iPad, with a three-column view and a similar set of basic, standard actions within easy reach. Applications should take full advantage of giant screens when you have them. The system should restore itself to its previous working state each time you reboot. It seems like such common sense once you've used an iPad for any length of time. What's funny, though, is that all these things I've just mentioned are Windows behaviors. Or at least the first two are: Lion Mail is layout-wise a virtual clone of Outlook. Full-screen apps? That's something the Mac has held up as a Windows travesty since the Classic era, when the Windows equivalent to the Mac's multi-windowing, grouped-within-an-app behavior was MDI. And restoring your apps to their previous state is something I've seen in Linux of all places. What to make of this? Was Microsoft right all along? Has Apple come around to the Windows way of thinking, via the circuitous route of creating the iPod->iPhone->iPad interfaces and from there trying to extrapolate a desktop user environment? I suppose it would be predictable and disingenuous of me to say "no"; after all, it's impossible to deny that these ideas are nothing new, at least presented in these terms. But at the same time, this does represent a fresh take on the PC user experience, informed not by three decades of accretive sequential development and fine-tuning along a theme first suggested in the 1970s at Xerox, but rather by experience in the tablet space fulfilling millions of users' wildest fantasies. Full-screen apps in Lion, you can be sure, will not be like Excel still remains today, with control bars within control bars hiding workbooks with their edges sticking under the window borders so you have to move them around and shrink them in order to even get access to their per-document window control buttons so you can maximize them within the application window and get some work done, even though it then does a fantastic job of hiding the other workbooks you may have open. Full-screen mode, to judge by the examples on Apple's site, will be limited to those applications that are specifically designed for it, such as iPhoto and Mail (and iCal, for some reason— I'm almost positive they have some better examples on the way). They're not going to put system-wide window control buttons on every single app window so people end up covering a 2560x1280 screen with a Finder window with nine items in it. At least, they'd better not. Mail will look an awful lot like Outlook, true. And to be fair, there are worse things to emulate. Outlook is something people know how to use, and iPad Mail is similar enough in layout to the Outlook that everyone has to use at work that it's become more or less the de facto standard for how email should be done. So, hey, fine: Apple will redesign Mail to be more horizontally oriented for today's widescreen monitors, and to fit in more seamlessly with people's expectations. Maybe they'll even come up with a way to integrate calendaring into it, instead of having iCal sitting off in an island somewhere, not doing anything unless you remember to run it, and not handling Outlook-sourced appointment notifications with any intelligence. The iPhone and iPad have Exchange integration nowadays; it would be pretty embarrassing for the Mac, now that it's on the brink of acceptance into corporate environments again, to drag its heels on this front. But perhaps what's most visible about the changes in Lion is the nature of applications. Now they will no longer have to be launched out of a folder (representation) in the Dock, or out of the Dock itself (as another representation) if you've thought to drag the right icons into it, or out of a folder in the freaking filesystem (the more I think about this, the more ridiculous it even seems). Apps are now special objects, accessible via the Launchpad, which spreads them out across your screen as though it were an iPad, letting you sweep through pages with two fingers and organize them into contextual app folders, each a monolithic grabbable item that fits neatly into a grid without any barnacle-like uninstallers or README files or support folders floating around next to them. The App Store will handle all that from now on, with the added benefit of obviating all the similarly-ridiculous steps of downloading a .dmg or .zip file, unpacking it, mounting a disk image, moving an icon or double-clicking an installer... all stuff you'd think we'd have evolved past by now. The best part of all this will be how easy it makes the job for someone like me to explain how you get to your apps when your experience is not previous Mac versions, but only Windows and the iPad: "You want your apps, just click this, and there they all are. It's just like on your iP—oh, okay, you've got it already." The worst part, though? Well, I'll give you a hint: for apps to be a special class of objects in the OS, that means they're not just folder bundles in the filesystem anymore. They're represented by an intermediary layer. A stateful database. ...A registry, if you will. It's... it's fine. I'll be okay. So anyway. Lion represents the baldest move yet by Apple not only to incorporate ideas from its darling, the iPad, into the venerable Mac OS, but also to use the opportunity created by the iPad's unignorable success to roll in some ideas that apparently have been executed better in Windows all along, but that it would have been way too galling for Apple to have had to embrace them after so much time shunning them. Now they get to adopt these behaviors by painting them as "iOS-inspired" rather than "Windows-inspired"; and they can get away with it, because Apple is by this point a juggernaut whose momentum is unprecedented since perhaps the time of Windows' initial climb to prominence. Nobody's going to vilify them over this; or if they do, it won't matter in the slightest to Apple. Microsoft (and others) have certainly copied enough Apple features over the years that there's no reason to fear retaliation, even if such things as software patents could even be brought to bear on such obvious and/or ancient ideas as full-screen applications and session state preservation. Apple can just take their pick of what have come to be understood as the best solutions in computing, whether they come from the iPad, Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, and they can do it with a smile and a confident wave. There's no better time for it. Hard-core users won't suffer under Lion because these new features either are all at the display layer (and can thus be ignored or supplanted), or genuinely work better anyway (and thus will gain currency with geeks just as Exposé and Spaces and QuickLook have become power-user staples even if casual users don't even know they exist). The App Store will revolutionize the concept of "computing" for everyday people, but geeks will always be able to download unsigned code and won't have to worry about "jailbreaking" their Macs. (Not yet, anyway.) And for mainstream software, they'll probably find the App Store to be all-around better anyway. But ultimately the end result of all this is that a Mac will finally be something that someone whose proficiency with technology is encapsulated by the iPad's level of abstraction can approach with exactly as much confidence as he has when he swipes the "unlock" slider. An iPad may just be a big iPod Touch, and the Mac can now be just a big iPad. Neither statement is true, of course. But nobody needs to know that who doesn't want to. And everyone else... well, they've got a lot of money to spend.